Who Needs Facebook? Zynga Preps Zynga.com, 'Gaming Graph'

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On Thursday, Zynga officially took the wraps off Zynga.com, the "Project Z" the company promised that will offer a direct relationship with gamers.

In an interesting twist, Zynga also announced a pair of partners that will be launching their own social games on the Zynga platform, placing Zynga, in some sense, in competition with Facebook as a gaming destination.

Zynga.comthe "Project Z" the company talked about last Octoberwill go live in beta form in early March, although executives did not give a specific date. Five games will debut on the site, including CastleVille, CityVille, Hidden Chronicles, Words with Friends, and Zynga Poker. In addition, users will be able to play Row Sham Bow's Woodland Heroes and a game from MobScience.

Although Facebook attracts 845 million monthly active users, Zynga's user base includes 140 million monthly users. The difference? Zynga users, by definition, play games; it's not likely that all of a user's Facebook friends, however, do.

That distinction made sense to Philip Holt, chief executive of Row Sham Bow. "For us, we're a small independent company that's been in business less than a year. For everyone we talk to in the space, the challenge is user acquisition," he said.

It's unclear what effect Zynga.com will have on Facebook. What is clear is that Zynga's revenue contributes heavily to Facebook's bottom line: 12 percent of Facebook's 2011 revenue, according to its S1 filing.

"We're thrilled to see Zynga use our login and payments platform to expand the possibilities for people to play games in more places with their friends," said Sean Ryan, director of games partnerships at Facebook, in a statement.

And Zynga is prepping tools to help Facebook users migrate over to Zynga.comand stay there. All of a user's Facebook friends who play CastleVille, for example, will show up in your version running on Zynga.com. Zynga has also built in new tools and features to find gamers playing your social game in the way that you play it, said Reed Shaffner, the lead product manager of Zynga.com. Progress made on Facebook will also be reflected on Zynga.com.

"On Facebook, you've built up a rich social identity, and we don't want you to compromise it," Shaffner said.

"We just want to think of Facebook as a social graph for your life, and we're building a gaming graph for your play," Shaffner added.

The Zynga.com tools will suggest new "zFriends," or Zynga friends, together with a popup window that shows you which friends are online, and what games they're playing. Player profiles will break down your favorite games, but also perform "analytics" of your recent activity, including a user's most helpful zFriends, and how often they play a certain game.

One of the requests Zynga has received from users concerns how fast users can progress; Shaffner said that acquiring a certain item from a friend or merely finding it in the game world can take days. Now, users can post to a "social stream" to request items or just drop into a live chat to talk or send gifts.

Zynga, naturally, wants to bring on other social games onto the platform. "Given it's our own gaming destination, I think it's fair to say that we want as many games on here as we can possibly have," Shaffner said.

It's also just a "matter of time" before the Zynga.com platform is moved to the mobile space, added Manuel Bronstein, the general manager of Zynga Direct.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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